Living through calligraphy

15032008

The Calligraphers’ Night by Yasmine Ghata

Life, love and loss expressed through the medium of calligraphy during early to mid and late 20th Century Istanbul. A lovely, melancholic and almost poetic work but didn’t quite get there in the end. In the end it felt to me that the author was just trying to force the profundity a bit too hard.

Worth a read though (and a nice contemporary companion to the only other book I’ve read relating to Islamic art and calligraphy, the very wonderful My Name is Red by Orhan Pahnuk.)